January 15, 2015 - Install a car seat

I'm beginning to realize how mundane some of these adventures must seem to an outsider (especially those that have children of their own).  There must be a lot of "Well, duh" moments, or times where you've read this blog and thought "Yeah, of course that's how you do that, stupid, why didn't you know that?" I understand, and I hope that you can forgive my ignorance on some of these matters.  But see, for me, this is like Leif Erickson discovering the new world (yup, forget that hack Columbus).  I'm an explorer to these parts, boldly going where no man has gone before (ok, where LOTS of men have gone before).  I'm a stranger in a strange land, can you grok it? (The award for the nerdiest sci-fi reference goes to...)

So with that being said, yesterday I tackled a task that might seem to many to be very simple: installing a car seat.  But I've never had a car seat in my car, and I currently don't own one.  Installing a Saturn V rocket booster to my muffler would have resulted in the same conclusion: "I don't know how to do this."  I enlisted Joe Cristy, of curveball fame from The How-To Month, to help.

Joe is the father of two ridiculously cute kids.  His son is now old enough to sit in the forward facing, upright style of seat. His daughter, on the other hand, is too young for this and is still in the reclined seat that faces backwards.  It was this second type of car seat that I wanted to learn how to install, as it will be the first that I will be using with Nugget.

First things first...there are a lot of car seats.  Holy crap, you'd think that a lot of people were having babies! There are tons of different kinds (just like everything in the world of baby consumerism, it seems), and a Google search yields endless results.  I'm going to have to do a lot of research to find the right one...

Joe said that one of the best things to get is a mat that keeps your car as clean as possible (he was still removing Kix from the seat cushions while he was showing me this).  The mat that he had was helpful because it had pockets that could store diapers and other assorted baby stuff.

The first step is to install the base.  This is the bottom portion of the car seat system.  It usually stays in the car itself, and the seat then clips in to it.  We'll be having two of these bases, one for my car and one for Elizabeth's to save time and effort.  Instead of having to remove the base every time we switch cars, we will conveniently just move the seat portion.

The base itself has a strap that looks a lot like a seat belt.  This is threaded through the base, and it ends with buckles that attach directly to the metal clips found in most bench seats in cars.

You then tighten the strap as you pull it through the base.  You want to make sure that there is very little movement with the base.  It defeats the purpose of the stability of a car seat if it is moving around.  Once it is as tight as it can go, you attach the other buckle to the clip on the other side.

Joe's car seat was similar to many that I have researched online.  It had several flaps and locks that would fold over the strap to keep it secure.  Once the strap was tightened and clipped in, you simply fold these flaps down.

The last step is to lock the base (it's that thing with the little orange button in the picture above.  As Joe put it, he felt like you needed a degree in engineering to figure this out when first doing it.  That's something I feel will come up in a variety of situations throughout this process.  It's my first time with all of this, and there is so much pressure to do it right that I can easily see myself second guessing something as easy as locking a car seat into place.

You know that the base is locked if you see a green button instead of the orange one.  If you forget this process, most car seats come with pretty easy to follow diagrams along the side of the base.  After this, you lock the seat portion of the car seat system into the metal bars in the base.  The result will look something like this:

Child and Mother not included...

Joe also suggested another piece of baby equipment that he says has proven to be invaluable.  Because children are supposed to be rear facing until at least two years old, it's often hard to see what it is that they are doing while they are facing away from you.  That's where this comes in:

It's a mirror that lets you see your rear-facing child.  You can see if they have gotten to sleep, or if they are upset, or if they are amazed by the wonder of their own hands and feet.  Joe said that the real fun begins when you can switch to a forward facing seat. That's where practicing vocabulary comes in, because now you actually have a participating passenger in the back.  Until then, the mirror works just fine.

It is important to note for any expectant parents (or any who just didn't know this) that often your local fire or police departments will install these seats for you free of charge.  They will also check to make sure that you have installed it correctly.  This might be a good thing to do, even if I am confident that I can get the seat in securely and safely.

Joe told me that the drive home from the hospital is terrifying, and that I will never drive safer.  Hopefully, with a little practice, I'll have the car seat in place so that it's not the white knuckle affair that it could be.

However, if you see a Ford Focus Wagon with it's flashers on going 2 miles an hour down Wendover during the first week of June, please avoid it at all cost...